Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Expectations

We expect every person to be able to get pregnant with no difficulties; we expect those pregnancies to be carried to full term, resulting in a healthy, beautiful baby screaming as they enter into the world.

Throughout my pregnancies Sam has never wanted to know the gender of our children, and people undoubtedly asked "boy or girl?", and I would say, "we don't know", and they would reply, "As long as the baby is healthy, that's all that matters." I would of course agree, but it always bothered me a little. We expect every baby to have all 10 fingers and 10 toes, to have all 4 limbs, to not have a blemish, we expect nothing short of perfection.

As our children grow we expect them to behave, to listen, to be caring, to make good choices, to be nice, to eat healthy food, to simply be the best that they themselves can be. As a parent we set our standards for expectations high, beyond high, even unreasonably high in some cases. We dream of our children growing up and becoming whatever they want to be, (in most cases) we expect them to go to school, get jobs, get married, have kids, and live their lives to the fullest.

There might be some people who want to "fix" Sonya, to make her brain function like the rest of ours. They would expect her to be just like her siblings. They have to wrap their head around the fact that she is not what they expected. They expected her to be the same as every other typically developing person. I have been thinking about this tonight. If Sonya had met these expectations, if she was "fixed", if she was like all our other kids, like all the other typically developing kids, then she wouldn't be Sonya. She wouldn't be who she came into this earth destined to be, who she needs to be for this world. She is actually exactly what g-d expected her to be. She is exactly what Sonya Ahava was expected to be. In a sense she is perfect. No one is 100% perfect. While her life would be significantly easier if she was not Sonya perfect, I still have my expectations for her. I still expect her to bring me joy, to live her life to the fullest, to be the best she can be. I know she will be a lot like her siblings, she will challenge me, she will make me laugh, she will make me cry, she will change my perspective on things, she will teach me more about my purpose in life. I expect her to make me better. But most of all, I expect her to just be herself.

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Sonya had her first swim class today. She loved the water. She spent 23 minutes extremely happy and cried for the last 7 minutes of class. She exceeded my expectations because I didn't think she would enjoy the water as much as she did. I do not have any pictures of her in the water, but she loved floating on her back, swooshing from side to side, having water poured on her, looking in the mirror, and pushing her feet off the wall.